AEO (AI search)
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is making your business easy for AI assistants to understand, trust and quote: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and voice assistants. It means direct answers on your pages, structured data, consistent business facts across the web, and content that answers the exact questions customers ask.
People don't only search anymore. They ask. "Who's a good roofer in Lufkin?" goes to ChatGPT or gets answered by Google's AI Overview before anyone scrolls to the links. Those answers are built from websites that state facts clearly. AEO makes sure yours is one of them.
What's included
Answer-first pages
Each page opens with a short, direct answer to its question, the passage an AI is most likely to quote, then the detail.
Structured data
schema.org markup for your business, services, areas, FAQs and articles, so machines read your facts without guessing.
Entity consistency
Your business name, owner, services and areas described the same way on your site, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories.
llms.txt
A plain-text summary of your business at /llms.txt, the emerging convention for AI crawlers.
Crawler access
We check that AI crawlers aren't accidentally blocked by your host or CDN (a common default), and ping Bing via IndexNow when pages change, because Bing's index feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot.
Question research
We collect the real questions customers ask you on the phone and turn them into pages and FAQs.
How it works
- AI visibility checkWe ask the major assistants about your trade in your town and record who they name.
- Fix the factsConsistent business details everywhere the assistants look.
- Answer-first contentRewrite key pages and add FAQ and guide content.
- Markup and accessStructured data, llms.txt, crawler rules, IndexNow.
- Re-checkRepeat the visibility check and report what changed.
AEO (AI search) questions
What is the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO aims to rank your pages in a list of search results. AEO aims to get your business quoted or named inside an AI-generated answer. They overlap heavily: clear, accurate, well-structured pages help both, so we do them together.
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
No. AI assistants don't sell placement in their answers. They build answers from content they can find and trust, which is why clear pages, structured data and consistent business facts matter.
Does AEO matter for a small local business?
Yes, and arguably more than for big brands. Local questions like "best mechanic in Huntsville" often have only a few businesses with clear, crawlable information, so a well-built small site can be the one that gets named.
How do you measure AEO?
We run the same set of questions through the major assistants before and after the work and record which businesses they name and cite. Google Search Console also shows impressions from searches that trigger AI Overviews.
Other services
Website design
Fast, mobile-first websites built to rank, load in about a second and turn visitors into calls and form fills.
Local SEO
Rank in the Google map pack and the top organic results for the searches your customers make in your town.
Google Business Profile
Set up, verify and tune your Google Business Profile so you show up on Google Maps and in the map pack.
Hosting & care plans
Hosting, SSL, backups, security, uptime checks and content updates, plus your GarnetRX dashboard.
Find out what's holding your website back.
Send us your website (or tell us you don't have one yet). We'll check how it ranks, how fast it is and what Google and AI assistants see, then send back a plain-English plan and a fixed quote.